Documents often require many revisions before they are ready for final publication. In many home and business environments, a writer will edit his document at a personal computer (PC) and print the document to a remotely-located, network printer. The writer must then travel to the printer to retrieve the printed document or have the document delivered to his location. During the revision process, the writer will often print what he thinks is the publication copy of a document only to find minor errors that are visible once it is in tangible form. For example, documents with headers and footers are often edited such that these parts of the document are not visible until printing. If the printed document contains header and footer formatting errors, the writer must first travel to the printer to retrieve the printed document, notice the errors, travel back to his PC to correct those errors, print the document again, then travel back to the printer to retrieve the corrected, printed document. Correcting these minor errors wastes both time and resources. Furthermore, once the writer sends his document to a conventional shared network printer, the printer prints that document as soon as the file has made its way through the printer queue. Consequently, others may be able to view or gain possession of the printed document before the writer has a chance to retrieve it.
Previous methods and devices have included graphical user interfaces (GUIs) at the printer, but none have addressed the particular problem associated with the publication process and security nor have they enhanced the tedious, back-and-forth revision process described above. For example, printers are known to allow a user to first print a reduced version of image files associated with digital imaging to prevent printing full-sized copies of unwanted photos. Other devices include printing interfaces which allow a user to apply formatting changes to a portion of a document without changing the original file and to print a copy with those changes. Further printers will display information about mismatches between a printer's resources and the file in a user interface or allow manual or automatic changes to a document based the compatibility of the document content with printer resources. Still other references disclose methods for secure printing which employ data encryption/decryption techniques and the use of SMART cards.